Abstract

The conceptual metaphor theory, different from the traditional metaphor theories, is regarded as a cognitive tool. It holds the opinion that the abstract inference issues from human bodies’ experience or visual appearance. For most people, economic terms are abstract and hard to understand. Thereby, metaphor is widely used in economic field. In a piece of news, headline is the heart, the most communicable part. In order to show the content and to raise the readers’ interests, conceptual metaphor is usually widely used no matter in eastern or western world. This article makes a comparative study between English and Chinese news headlines from the view of conceptual metaphor.

Key words:  conceptual metaphor, economic news, news headline, comparison

摘 要

不同于传统的隐喻理论, 概念隐喻理论把隐喻看作是一种认知的工具，认为人们抽象的推理来源于身体的体验和视觉的感知。我们可以通过概念隐喻的使用来理解抽象的东西。对于大多数人来说，经济术语都是抽象难以理解的。因此，隐喻在经济领域被广泛使用。新闻标题是新闻的心脏，是新闻中最有表现力的部分。为了表达内容以及吸引读者兴趣，不论是中文的还是英文的经济新闻标题中，概念隐喻都常常被使用。本文就是从概念隐喻的角度，对中英文经济新闻标题来进行比较。

关键词： 概念隐喻；经济新闻；新闻标题；比较

1. Introduction
The study of metaphor can be classified into three periods. The first period can be traced back to the time of Aristotle who regards metaphor as a rhetoric device of language. Aristotle’s view of metaphor presents the mainstream of the study for thousands of years and influences the later theory such as substitution theory and comparison theory. The second period focuses on the semantic study of metaphor. The last period is the multidisciplinary study of metaphor, during which Lakoff and Johnson proposed the conceptual metaphor theory. The publication the book Metaphors We Live By marks the real beginning of study of metaphor from the cognitive perspective and a new stage of the study of metaphor. It holds that “metaphor is pervasive, not just in language but in thought and action, and our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is metaphorical in nature” Because of the pervasiveness of metaphor in our daily life and language, we are sometimes unaware of it.